Startup Piston 'ready for fight' with VMware

Network World - Having just released its new cloud operating system, Piston Cloud Computing finds itself in a contentious position -- and company co-founder Josh McKenty says that is exactly where the company wants to be.

"We're building a product that's great for private clouds, and that puts us head-to-head with VMware," McKenty says. "And I'm ready for that fight."

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McKenty didn't mince words when describing his young company's new product, which it is touting as the industry's first private cloud operating system based on the OpenStack framework.

"The thing that I want to make sure is crystal clear is that Piston Enterprise OS is an alternative to VMware," says McKenty, a former technical architect with the NASA Nebula team that originally designed the OpenStack framework. "This is an alternative to the proprietary walled garden approach to cloud that VMware has adopted."

For a company that has only been in business since July, and a new product based on technology that has only been around since the summer of 2010, making these bold claims means the company will have to live up to the hype. Given a little time, some industry observers believe Piston Cloud Computing may have a chance.

Jay Lyman, senior analyst covering enterprise software for 451 Research, says Piston Enterprise OS, or PentOS, comes at a time when many enterprise customers have expressed a desire for new options for private cloud management.

"I think that from what we hear from customers and users of OpenStack and those that are interested in it, it's serving as an alternative in the market, mainly to Amazon and VMware," Lyman says. "And I think VMware is obviously widely deployed in the enterprise, and Amazon is the big cloud computing leader in the enterprise now. But there is a desire to have an alternative provider of cloud services."

In McKenty's opinion, VMware and other private cloud service providers are the only companies with which Piston Cloud Computing intends to compete, primarily because other efforts in the OpenStack community have been directed at the public cloud.

"We don't see ourselves as competitive to other OpenStack distributions," McKenty says. "Folks working in the OpenStack community are really addressing specific use cases. You've got to pick a hypervisor and a network model to make all these decisions, and you end up with a product that's perfectly fit for a specific use. Almost everybody working on those distributions is building products that are great for public clouds."

However, Lyman does not expect the OpenStack market to remain so friendly. As vendors see the rise in popularity among OpenStack tools for managing the cloud, it won't be long until these companies naturally end up going after the same customers.